1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to astronomy and more specifically to the improved aiming of telescopes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telescopes can be difficult to aim without sophisticated tracking hardware and software. There exist fully automated telescope aiming systems. These systems align a telescope to the celestial coordinate system. Then, the telescopes receive and input of coordinates for an object the user wishes to track. Once the object is identified and the telescope is positioned on the object, the telescope will track the object without further input from the user.
Another feature of the aiming systems is to use directional buttons to move the telescope along the axis of right ascension and declination of the equatorial coordinate system. This way of aiming of telescopes can be particularly difficult because the optics of a telescope or telescope finder can skew or even invert the image of the object of interest observed through the telescope so it takes a lot of mental concentration for the user to grasp which way the user needs to move the telescope to achieve the direction the user wishes to optically move. This difficulty can be frustrating for casual telescope users and even some amateur telescope users. Therefore, it would be useful to have a way of aiming a telescope that removed the hassle of figuring out which way to physically move the telescope to achieve the desired optical movement.